Frost wrote this poem using standard, modern language....

The Road Not Taken : TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

For the large moral meaning which "The Road Not Taken" seems to endorse - go,as I did, your own way, take the road less traveled by, andit will make "allthe difference"-does not maintainitself when the poem is looked at morecarefully. Then one notices how insistent is the speaker on admitting, at the time of hischoice, that the two roads were in appearance "really about the same," that they"equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black," and that choosing onerather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearlythan to say that the road taken had "perhaps the better claim." But in the finalstanza, as the tense changes to future, we hear a different story, one that will be told"with a sigh" and "ages and ages hence." At that imagined time andunspecified place, the voice will have nobly simplified and exalted the whole impulsivematter into a deliberate one of taking the "less traveled" road:

Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken ..

Convinced that the poem was deeply personal and directly self-revelatoryFrost's readers have insisted on tracing the poem to one or the other of twofacts of Frost's life when he was in his late thirties. (At the beginning of theDante is thirty-five, "midway on the road of life,"notes Charles Eliot Norton.) The first of these, an event, took place in thewinter of 1911-1912 in the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire, while the second, ageneral observation and a concomitant attitude, grew out of his long walks inEngland with Edward Thomas, his newfound Welsh-English poet-friend, in 1914.

SparkNotes: Frost’s Early Poems: “The Road Not Taken”

Frost writes this poem with a calm and collective narration, spoken by the traveler, who is talking with himself trying to decide which road is the better choice.

In Elizabeth Shepley Sergeantlocates in one of Frost's letters the source for "The Road Not Taken."To Susan Hayes Ward the poet wrote on February 10, 1912:

A summary of “The Road Not Taken” in Robert Frost's Frost’s ..

Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word "roads" ratherthan "waies" or "paths" or even "pathways." Infact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, "Twopaths diverged in a yellow wood," Frost reacted with such feeling"Two"that the transcription of his reply made it necessary bothto italicize the word "roads" and to follow it with an exclamationpoint. Frost recited the poem all right, but, as his friend remembered, "hedidn't let me get away with 'two paths!'"

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

As I now understand it, the meaning of this poem being written in all italics is that it is the first of a series or group of poems that all belong together.

PLEASE Stop Misinterpreting "The Road Not Taken"! - …

Although the roads differ in their directions, Frost carefully sidesteps making any real judgment about either road, Poetic devices: End stopping piece of poetry, in that the meter and the sense cause one to pause naturally at the end of each line; except the fourth line in each stanza, which runs on into the fifth and final line of each stanza.

PLEASE Stop Misinterpreting “The Road Not Taken”

Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone's eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn't go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out. I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity.